buoy
by marblesharp
Summary: She's learning how to live with a castaway heart. Annie Cresta and friends, post-Mockingjay.


AN: I own nothing. Hope you enjoy!

* * *

><p><strong>.buoy.<strong>

Like clockwork, she stirs and pours herself out of the bed sheets. Shuffling through the house and out onto the terrace, Johanna is right on schedule. Every night, a quarter after three, her bed seethes. So she sleepwalks.

I'm not sure why she finds comfort in sleep to stand by the railing and look out at the ocean, but one of these days I might be brave enough to join her.

For now, though, I hide under my blanket that is suddenly too thin.

* * *

><p>Johanna calls out from the kitchen that we have received a letter from Peeta.<p>

I leave the nursery after a long look around the

blue-green

walls of cresting waves. It was my idea to bring the sea to my son's bedroom, even when it's right outside his window.

I find Johanna half-sitting with her knee curled in on the seat cushion and the other dangling above the ground. (Finnick never emphasized how short she was.) She's hunched over a sheet of paper, her brown eyes lurching and bumping like an ancient typewriter as they drag along the lines of words and reset with a slight jerk once they reach the right margin of the page.

I ask after our friends in District Twelve. We have kept in touch with Peeta through mail for a while now. He's the only one who updates us; Katniss just sends her regards through his letters, and sometimes Haymitch calls us when he's sober but all he does is ask after us.

Johanna starts with the worst possible bit of news as she scans over the letter. Buttercup, Katniss Everdeen's beloved tomcat whom I remember from District Thirteen, has passed from disease. We don't know him enough to mourn but I tell Johanna to write back our condolences.

She frowns at the following words scrawled in pencil, perplexed, trying to make sense of them. Expressing her uncertainty, her voice lilts at the end and she looks to me for an answer when she tells me Haymitch is in a relationship.

I ask skeptically if it's _our Haymitch_, sliding the shredded envelope from the table and gingerly tossing it onto the blooming coals in the stove. The stamp, the new seal of Panem, ogles up at me as it curls and dies.

I look over Johanna's shoulder at the letter and find the older man's name underlined several times by Peeta, as if he couldn't believe he had written the outlandish words either. We both laugh incredulously, and she continues reading aloud. A lady named Hazelle, Peeta gushes with details of less drinking and more bathing. Ever the mystery, Katniss is annoyed by their affiliation.

"So that's why he hasn't called," Johanna remarks. She then claims that it won't last, and I shrug nonchalantly, silently hoping it does. After what they've been through, the remaining victors deserve the chance to start a better life, with no Capitol looming over them. I had my chance and took it too soon. Johanna refuses hers.

When I probe for information on Peeta and Katniss, Johanna admits there isn't much mentioned about their relationship. "Probably still in the rebuilding stage," she says.

I smile. "Like us."

Her eyes widen but she recovers in a second, raising a brow and shaking her head. "We're not dating, Annie."

I explain that, like Katniss and Peeta, we're repairing each other. Living together has been the best for us, even if she only came here out of respect for Finnick.

"Well, yeah." Her answer has the familiar _isn't is obvious?_ tone. It's kind of her voice in general.

I shrug and look away, embarrassed.

Johanna concludes that the rest of the letter is just Peeta blabbing about his bakery and how well it's coming along. She rolls her eyes, says he was running out of things to write about. I agree knowingly with a head bob and a smile. She folds the paper and sets it on the table, then ruffles the back of her head with her fingers, spiking her hair back up.

Comfortable silence settles over the house and mingles with the briny air. She's brash, I'll admit, but she likes quiet as much as I do.

I suggest visiting Twelve after the bakery is finished, and that we should invite them here sometime as well. Johanna doesn't answer right away but she's nodding by the time the sun founders and casts long, tipping masts on the peach walls.

(The shadows look like reaching arms.)

* * *

><p>Finnick always said the sea revives people.<p>

He claimed his great (_great, great, great,_ he reeled off on his fingers as I smacked his arm, laughing) grandfather told stories about the time before Panem where people traveled to the coast when they wanted a respite from their lives. That's what District Four has become.

Verbena Everdeen assisted me home from the Capitol and stayed to help with the baby and open a hospital. Now her biweekly visits are less clinical and more cordial, like she'd rather hear about my day than how I'm feeling on certain medication. I think she likes it here, even as she drowns herself in work. The sea alleviates the pain of her losses.

Johanna Mason showed up weeks after I settled in, five months along with the baby. Before our imprisonment, I knew her as a victor, a rebel, and a good friend of Finnick, and after, as an ally of sorts, so I recognized her right off despite her exhausted form. Shoulder drooping from a swollen satchel and a pillow tucked under her arm, she was stooped on the veranda as wind whipped the palm trees and angered the sea behind her. She gave me a sarcastically cordial smile and chirped with resigned petulance, "The things I do for that asshole, let me tell you."

Verbena was living with me then. She took Johanna's luggage to the only empty room left in the house and made her tea. The whole of her first night here, I just stared at her and willed her to leave. I couldn't understand why she would come here if it (I) was such a chore. Apart from Finnick and Mags, I accepted that no one could be trusted and that they didn't want to deal with me, anyway. And for the most part, that was okay. I spent a lot of my time shutting those people out.

Johanna, I learned after a few days in her company, had a similar passion. But before she'd slam the door shut and block off humanity, she'd tell it how shitty it was and that there weren't nearly enough _fuck you_s to express her apathetic hatred for it.

Somehow I could still see why she and Finnick were as close as they were. Among other things, there's the bond all victors share. From what Finnick told me, they feel they have to be strong for each other to prove they can be strong for themselves. Kind of like a Game, but we are accustomed to those. (Well, not me.)

Within a week, Johanna realized that I wasn't a chore. Soon I didn't need Verbena as a diurnal nurse anymore. Finn and Johanna were a crowd to me, though I valued their company more than anything that was possible to wish for. (Impossible: the arms and reviving embrace of my son's father.)

Returning home and living with Johanna Mason brought us back to life.

* * *

><p>She slams the phone back into the receiver and I wince at the <em>clangclick<em>.

"Why do you have to be so damn nice?" Johanna snaps. Her eyes are overcooked; she stewed outside for a long time last night. "You could have at least told me before you just decided to invite them. Now we have to make the whole stinking house presentable in like, a day."

Uncomfortable with her irritation towards me, I stammer to defend myself but I already know she won't listen. What's done is done. We are expecting company from District Twelve tomorrow morning and our house is only fit to welcome Verbena, who drastically lowered her tidiness standards after meeting Johanna. Unfortunately, due to her hectic work, she isn't available today to help us prepare and will not be attending tomorrow.

Johanna picks up a pair of shorts under the settee and swivels her brown spikes as she looks for a place to fling it. She mutters, "We need a maid or a black hole or…"

I propose a black hole with a weak laugh, and the scowl is not surprising. (They are so ordinary that I count them as smiles.)

* * *

><p>Katniss never came across as an affectionate person.<p>

Her usual glower is today an earnest smile. Her hug is calming and I sense it is a rare, special action, which surprises me so much that I forget to greet Peeta and Haymitch after parting from her embrace.

It doesn't matter, though, because Johanna punches Haymitch's shoulder in greeting, the two ornery friends sneering as they try to outdo the other's quip, and Peeta is having trouble keeping all of their coats on the pegs. After the fourth time he has to bend down and scrape them off the ground, I kneel beside him to help.

"Have you been okay?" he asks quietly, knowing the truth and letting me lie anyway. His eyes are fixed on the rumpled leather hide of Katniss' coat. (His eyes are the sky - I know the sea.)

I hesitate to swallow whatever looms threateningly in my throat. "Johanna and Mrs. Everdeen have been very supportive."

The coats barely stay on the hooks but they don't slip off. They will behave until our backs are turned, probably.

"That's good," is his reply. (Except it's not.) "It's good to see you again, Annie."

I'm quite the view nowadays, I've heard.

* * *

><p>We have almost finished our dinner of reheated leftovers and Peeta is halfway through a story when the stares become too much.<p>

The people stare, the ghosts stare, the shadows stare,

_they all stare_.

And I cannot meet their eyes. Not the pitying sky ones or stewing chocolate ones or worrying storm cloud ones. They all need to be blue-green and they're not.

Ripping my cardigan off of the peg that I only used for the guests, I hear Haymitch ask something, and Johanna answers him before the screen door snaps shut. I fly down the stairs and around the lattice structure underneath the beach house that veils the stilts.

The ocean may be our backyard but the Victors' Village is perched on a little cliff. Sloping down from the neighborhood are the ruins of the marina, the harbor, the town, everything I came from. It's still under reconstruction, like all of the districts, like all of Panem, yet unlike all of the bits of me left behind that are too damaged or unnecessary to bother repairing. Whoever survived the revolts still live down there, but those who came back to nothing now inhabit the grand beach houses that other victors used to live in.

They recede like waves behind the rock as I descend the wooden stairway to the beach below. Their lights that seem to glow from the rock remind me of dawn.

I peel off my sandals and leave them on the bottom step. The sand squishes between my toes, and I think, _home_.

I mourn for whom I've lost these past two years.

_Finnick._

_Finn._

* * *

><p>I wasn't a bad mother. Verbena assured and reassured me of that. Sometimes infants die, even healthy little baby boys who promised to resemble their fathers as best they could. I figured I deserved it, naming my son the way I did.<p>

I kissed both of their bronze waves every morning I was with them but never on the same day. I teased Finnick about his one dimple and almost cried when Finn responded to my coos with a one-dimpled grin. And their eyes.

Those

blue-green

eyes.

They haunt me. They used to stare, used to appear in everyone else's eyes, terrifying me. But lately I've been seeing different irises, and now I'm afraid I am losing both my Finnicks. But _they_ abandoned _me_.

Finnick left me stranded ashore when I needed him, sailed past my pleas for rescue. Finn, my buoy, beaconed me into the violent swells with the promise of security and then vanished, leaving me to drown. (It's ridiculous thinking a baby screwed me over - I blame my husband most.)

Why is it that I can't forgive them, but I still love them so much it's _so damn frustrating?_ My castaway heart is so tired of staying afloat.

* * *

><p>Katniss finds me by the water in the snot-leaking stage of crying. I wipe my sleeve under my nose and accidentally smear it across my cheek. I'm so miserable I laugh at my disgusting appearance. She pretends not to notice.<p>

Verbena told them about the baby before I was ready to accept it. They all know but they act as though I shouldn't. Like if Finn's death didn't push me over the edge, mentioning it would.

The black night waves crawl up the sand, try to lap my toes. The distant rumble doesn't pause when Katniss speaks.

"When I lost her, I…" She has to look up at the stars to compose herself, one and a half seconds in. Whatever she's going to tell me, she has not spoken to anyone. Understandably, she goes for another approach. "I know how you feel, Annie. Nothing I say will bring them back, and I understand that."

She hugs her naked arms (is her jacket still on its peg?) while I wait for her to get to the point. The _accept that they are gone_ stuff goes through the imaginary holes in my head after being drilled with lectures like this.

"You're angry at them for leaving. I was with her, too - I still am, kind of. But when I think about Prim," she chokes, then looks like she's scolding herself, "and how I'd been since she died... She wouldn't want me to be sad." Her eyes match the clouds that veil the moon, bright and threatening rain. "And I don't think Finnick and Finn would want you to be sad either."

She's sobbing now, and the ocean rumble cannot muffle her as she starts to warble some song melody to herself. (The girl on fire was doused when the bombs exploded.)

I'm (still) crying as well, with less hiccups and more snot. (The sea girl's heart was cast off to crashing currents when the two men who had the same name and smile and hair and eyes never met.)

I embrace her impulsively, and the cool, damp sand molds to our knees.

* * *

><p>"I want to keep in touch," I tell Katniss as we climb the stairs back to the Victor's Village. With each step I kick sand out of my sandals.<p>

She promises we will. Her dark brows furrow. "You should talk to Johanna. She was really worried when you left, but I told her I'd talk to you."

"And anyway," I finish, protective of Johanna, "I was headed toward the beach." She hates water. I still remember the wet

(gurgling, agonizing, splitting, excruciating, _too loud too loud too loud!_)

screams and the flashes of electric-blue during our imprisonment in the Capitol - and she does, too.

Katniss hesitates a moment, then shrugs. "She cares about you a lot."

I don't answer because I sort of already knew that.

I am still planning on what I'm going to tell everyone when we return to the beach house. For the most part, I apologize a lot. No one seems angry or cross, especially Johanna.

* * *

><p>My heart has moored when my northeastern friends leave. Finnick and Finn were my buoys, once upon a time. Now I'm tethered to another, and she's quite an anchor.<p>

I can feel her smiling at me as I call after my friends from the veranda, making last-minute promises to visit each other again soon.

Of course she has to add, "And hurry up with my wedding cake order for you two! I want it done before any kids start coming!"

"_Johanna!_" I shriek, and call out an apology to a blushing yet laughing Peeta. Katniss was already in the car, thankfully.

It's the most I've been alive since my wedding or after Finn's birth, and the most verve someone has ever had commanding Haymitch to call us more and to bring his new friend next time. Johanna ties for a close second after learning about the woman's children.

* * *

><p>I realize once she jumps at the screen door shuddering closed that, for all I've wondered about it, I haven't thought her night arrangement through very well.<p>

"Annie? What are you doing out here?" Johanna asks sixteen minutes after three o'clock.

"I thought you were sleepwalking," I reply, blushing. (Rather, I _always_ thought you were sleepwalking.) I awkwardly shift the blanket wrapped around my shoulders. "Yourself?"

She shrugs, sheepish. Her eyes are burnt, churning, and sticky around the sides. She blinks several times to squish her moonlit saltwater tears back into her head. "Just came out here to think. Or not think, actually."

(It's not working if you're crying.) "At the same time every night?"

Scowling, she asks indignantly, "Do you stalk me? Whatever. It's late and I'm freezing. We should go inside."

I refuse with a headshake and, with one arm, open my blanket to her. "Let's stay out here, okay?"

Simmering down, her response is a hesitant, thankful head bob. "I've been thinking about them a lot. My family, I mean,_" _she (finally) admits, huddled with me in the blanket. "I didn't want you to worry about me or think I was going mad or something."

I still wince at that word,

_mad_.

Noticing, she says that I don't need any stress right now.

"No, you can talk to me about them if you want to," I tell her. I remember being so curious about Finnick's friend Johanna Mason after he told me what he knew of her family. She needs a buoy as much as I do. I'm already anchored to her - aren't we tethered together?

Johanna sighs. "Once I start, you won't be able to shut me up."

I laugh and suggest, "Tomorrow morning, then?"

I know my friend well enough that I hear _of course; I've been waiting so long to talk about them, you selfish bitch_, instead of "Yeah, maybe."

Silent and almost content, we wait for morning as we sit on the top step of the veranda and watch shattered bits of moonlight wink at us from the endless rolling waves.

**.end.**


End file.
